ABSTRACT

In this article, relying on the Freudian definition of melancholy, the author analyses a corpus of three Quebec films : La Femme de l'hôtel by Léa Pool (1984), Cargo by François Girard (1990), and Léolo by Jean-Claude Lauzon (1992). What these three films share has been called the "post-referendum syndrome" that was brought on by the failure of the first referendum on sovereignty-association in 1980.